The real lesson of history: there is no going back.

Traditionally, Thanksgiving celebrates a mutually happy relationship between Indians and grateful Plymouth colonists. But this year we were reminded that the Anglo-Saxons of New England repaid the kindness of the Indians by cheating them out of their lands and well nigh wiping them out with disease, rape, and pillage.

Defenders of the colonists might argue that the Indians were not all that friendly. Cape Cod history records that, when the French explorer Champlain ventured landfall there, he and his men aboard ship woke the second day to the sight of Indians dancing gleefully on the beach draped in the skins of the men who had gone ashore the night before to forage and to wash their clothes. The Indians around Plymouth colony who seemed less warlike had been decimated by illness a few years before the colonists arrived (all sickness did not arrive with the Europeans) and may have decided that conciliation was the better part of valor. But still the wary colonists took no chances. When they lost half their number in the first terrible winter they buried them in a common grave so that the Indians would not know how many were gone.

To argue this way, however, is to indulge in "presentism." This is the term historians use, according to Douglas Wilson (Atlantic Monthly, November 1992) to describe "the malaise that plagues American discussions of anything and everything concerning the past: the widespread inability to make appropriate allowances for prevailing historical conditions."

Before the quincentennial of Columbus on October 12, we of European ancestry were awash in the guilt induced by reminders from Native Americans that their ancestors' cultures were destroyed and their ancestors enslaved by those who accompanied and followed Columbus. The claim is that the only motive of Columbus and the early Spanish conquistadores was greed. The National Council of Churches issued a declaration calling the Columbus event "an invasion and colonization with legalized genocide, slavery, and economic exploitation"--certainly a black-and-white review of history.

Pope John Paul II, arriving in Santo Domingo for the Fourth General Latin American Episcopal Conference, acknowledged the abuses that resulted from Columbus's voyages but expressed gratitude for the evangelization of the Americas: "On October 12, exactly five centuries ago, Admiral Christopher Columbus...arrived in these lands and planted the cross of Christ. That is the beginning of the sowing of the precio. us seed of faith. And how can we not give thanks for that?" (Washington Post, October 13, 1992).

The pope's view is harshly challenged by the arbitrary statement of the Reverend Arthur Cribbs, a United Church of Christ clergyman and an African-American, who sees little or no positive contribution of European Christians to the history of the Americas. "The Spaniards who did speak out against the injustices were the exception .... "he says. "The overall effect has been that the majority of Native Americans...have not benefited from Christianity" (Washington Post, October 12).

This is "presentism" with a vengeance and there are defenses against it, including the one used by the pope: "[The Europeans] announced the love of God our Savior to people whose sacrifices to their gods included human sacrifice."

It can certainly be argued that ripping out the hearts of one's enemies or of sacrificial virgins is at least comparable in cruelty to burning at the stake; that slavery existed in the Americas before Columbus; that certain pre-Columbian cultures withered and disappeared in the jungle or fell to conquest before the white man appeared; etc. But what is overlooked, I think, is that the whole discussion dismisses five hundred years of history. It conceives of Europeans and the various Indian cultures as static, separate, and as distinct today as they were in 1492.

Richard Rodriguez, an editor of Pacific News Service and essayist on the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour' on Columbus Day, took quiet and stunning exception to this view when he looked into the camera and asked how he was supposed to feel about 1492. The date for him, he said, was a birthday, a birthday of his people, the mestizos, the descendants of the union of the Spanish and the Indian. To see history only in terms of the oppressor is to make the conquered ever victims, to ignore the ways in which they transcended loss, absorbed the newcomers, and changed them. The people we call Hispanic are primarily Indian, Rodriguez reminded us. According to David J. Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992), reviewed by Nicholas Lemann in the November Atlantic Monthly, "The Spaniards, starting with Cortes himself, immediately began inbreeding with the Indians, and their priests developed a New World Catholicism that was a mestizo religion, part Indian, part European." Spain sent women to the New World only a few times in three hundred years.

In Rodriguez's view, the proponents of the year of "the indigenous peoples" ignore the complications of history. He sees the rise of a new Indian (mestizo) culture extending from Tierra del Fuego to Seattle in the west and New York in the east. Spanish and English, he says, are now Indian languages; Los Angeles is an Indian city; the Catholic church in the Western Hemisphere is an Indian church. And who is to gainsay him?

When one culture encounters another-- no matter how bloody the original encounter-an equation is altered forever. Even the Indians of the Plains and the East who did not interbreed with the Spanish (although they did with the French) were changed irrevocably by the arrival of the conquistadores. In the West they became a mounted people because the Spanish brought the horse. How different would have been the Indian wars and the buffalo hunts without the sure-footed fast Indian pony! And how different would have been the history of the Southwest Indians like the Navajo and the Hopi without the sheep and goats also broughtby the Spanish. The encounter of cultures is an historical fact with consequences with which we must live. There is no going back.